


Of Dubious Value

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Crack, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Oblivious, Obsession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 13:26:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1471483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry has a best friend committed to getting him psychoanalyzed, another best friend obsessed with catching Draco Malfoy in crimes they can’t find evidence of him committing, and an Auror job that daily gets more stressful. He doesn’t <i>need</i> mysterious horoscopes offering him bizarre instructions, okay?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Dubious Value

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2009 for megyal's birthday. She asked for a fic with the prompt of “horoscope,” and here we are.
> 
> This fic is deeply silly.

“Where were you on the night of June eighteenth, Malfoy?”  
  
Harry sighed under his breath and implored the ceiling for help, silently. The ceiling, fantastically painted with a number of celebrity faces and “important” political events, just stared back at hum. Then Harry located his own face, and jerked his eyes away hastily. He  _hated_ that wizarding portrait of himself, which was grinning like an idiot and gesticulating in the air in a way Harry never did in real life.  
  
“I told you, Weasley, I was reporting on a banquet given by Celestina Warbeck to announce her new song,” Malfoy said. He sat at a desk in the middle of the office—neat except for the piles of parchment stacked along the walls and the cabinets above the stacks—and regarded Ron with a quizzical expression. His folded arms and the slightly snappish tone to his words were the only signs of his irritation. Harry shook his head. Malfoy had certainly changed since school. He could remember the time that a much less prolonged round of questioning from Ron would have reduced Malfoy to angry gibbering.   
  
 _He’s changed in other ways, too.  
  
Not going to think about that_ , Harry told himself firmly, and stepped in. “Ron, it’s plain as daylight that he didn’t assault Michael Corner,” he said. He gave Malfoy a single apologetic glance as he took Ron’s arm.   
  
Malfoy looked back at him, his eyes half-lidded and shining, and Harry started. The gaze physically  _hurt_  for a moment, as though Malfoy carried darts in his eyes.  
  
Telling himself not to be ridiculous, Harry turned back to Ron.  
  
“But it all  _fits_ ,” Ron said triumphantly. “Someone was seen running away from Corner’s body—”  
  
“Of course  _someone_  was,” Harry said, beginning to lose his own patience. Ron had been trying to arrest Malfoy for something practically since the moment that they both became full Aurors and Malfoy started his career as a celebrity reporter for the  _Daily Prophet_ , filling the role Rita Skeeter had abandoned because she could get much greater profits writing books about Dumbledore. “The person who assaulted him. But there’s no connection with Malfoy at all.” He rolled his eyes at Malfoy in sympathy and began dragging his partner to the door. “Sorry to have bothered you.”  
  
“But the figure was in a cloak!” Ron whispered heatedly to Harry. He didn’t seem to have noticed the eavesdropping spells all over the office that would bring any sound to Malfoy’s ears. “And Malfoy owns a cloak!” He pointed at a blue cloak that hung on a peg just inside the door.  
  
“I can produce four witnesses who would swear that I was covering the banquet,” Malfoy said pleasantly. “Including Warbeck herself.”  
  
Harry sighed. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He pushed Ron out the door, though Ron gripped the edges of the doorframe in an attempt to prevent that, and nodded to Malfoy. “Again, sorry for wasting your time. He wouldn’t shut up until we came and talked to you, though. Nice seeing you.”  
  
“Oh, yes, it was,” said Malfoy, with the slow smile that had almost convinced  _Harry_  to let Malfoy interview him and had witches falling at his feet, according to the people who reported on notorious ex-Death Eaters. “And I wouldn’t say that it was a waste of time. Not with what I learned.”  
  
Harry sighed again and turned away. Probably, there would be an exposé next week on “Harry Potter and His Mad Partner He Tries and Fails to Keep Under Control.”   
  
“But the cloak had a ragged hood!” Ron protested as they walked through the  _Prophet’s_  headquarters to their Apparition point. Harry had to steer him around several scuttling reporters, two boys staggering under an enormous load of parchment, and a weeping witch who wandered in a zigzag pattern down the corridor.  
  
“So what?” Harry muttered. He smiled feebly at the witch, who had stopped crying when she saw his scar. When she started to fumble for a piece of paper, he shook his head and pushed Ron to go faster.  
  
“So the hood must have caught on something,” Ron said. “ _Like Corner’s outstretched hand as he tried frantically to restrain his assailant._ ”  
  
Harry, familiar with his partner’s tactics, made sure Ron left the building first, so that he didn’t sneak back to Malfoy’s office and try to arrest him.  
  
 _Although that would give me an excuse to look at him again—_  
  
Harry cut the thought off. There were photographs aplenty in the papers of late if he really wanted to indulge that kind of thing. It seemed that Malfoy was building an addition to the Manor and refused to reveal what he wanted it for. Picture after picture showed him staring moodily into the distance, wind slightly stirring his hair, as he stood next to the large wall around the building project.  
  
Harry would be the first to admit that he’d spent far too much time noting the exact way that hair blew down to frame a face that was no longer pointy, except he had no one that he could admit it to.  
  
 _Keep your mind and your eyes on your work, Harry._  
  
*  
  
 _You will soon meet a man who dazzles you and sweeps you off your feet!_  
  
Harry blinked and stared at the horoscope in the  _Prophet’s_  Leo section. Hermione told him that reading his horoscope was a bad habit. “Nothing about it makes any sense, Harry,” she would say with that painful earnestness she brought to everything she did lately, clutching his arm. “It’s just generalized statements that every reader twists into something that can apply to her. Like cold reading by psychics. Now,  _psychoanalysis_ —” But that was usually the point where Harry stopped listening, because he knew all Hermione’s potted lectures about psychoanalysis by heart at this point.  
  
He’d never managed to tell her that he knew the horoscopes were rubbish, and that was why he read them. Too much else in his life was either deadly serious, like murders and kidnappings and that threat of releasing a Muggle bomb on Hogwarts last week, or ridiculousness that he had to treat seriously, like Ron and Hermione’s obsessions. The horoscopes gave him a moment of laughter.  
  
But this one was weirdly specific.   
  
After a moment, Harry shrugged, put the paper aside, and turned to face Ron, who’d just come in with their new load of cases and two cups of tea. “What do we have for today?” he asked, Levitating his cup out of Ron’s hand. Ron was apt to read interesting files on the way to the office and drop things in consequence.  
  
Ron blinked up at him, then brightened. “I found a connection between Malfoy and the latest murder case,” he said.  
  
“Really,” Harry muttered. Ron never  _had_  forgiven Malfoy for briefly dating Ginny the year after Ginny left Hogwarts and “breaking her heart.” The fact that Ginny was now a happy lesbian living with her partner Lavender Brown in Wales didn’t seem to enter his head. Of course, if it tried, then Ron would declare that it was Malfoy’s fault for turning Ginny off men. That she also seemed to have turned Malfoy off women was a fact banished to the utter darkness of Ron’s ignorance. “In what capacity?”  
  
“ _See_?” Face bright with the flush of the vindicated, Ron dropped the files on Harry’s desk. Or, rather, he tried to drop two files and had to juggle with six others that independently decided to go in different directions. Harry Summoned them carefully back into order and looked at the two files Ron was talking about.  
  
“Ron,” he said gently.  
  
Ron, who was humming the victory song of the Chudley Cannons under his breath, turned around with a brilliant smile. “Yes?”  
  
“One of these is notice of a murder that’s been committed in Diagon Alley,” Harry said, and laid the file gingerly aside. He  _hated_  cases like this, where there would undoubtedly be a lot of interviews with real witnesses and those who only claimed to have seen something. Long, tiring days, and always someone trying to stare at or touch his scar. “And one of them is a notice of Malfoy asking for protection because someone’s been threatening him. Malfoy didn’t commit the murder.”  
  
“But don’t you see?” Ron hitched a leg up on Harry’s desk and waved his hand. This caused a passionate spray of tea to cover half the files on the desk, which Harry hissed at and spelled off. “Someone is obviously threatening Malfoy because they figured out he committed the murder. It’s  _perfect_.”  
  
“What’s perfect is the way that you can keep walking upright and breathing when every other thought in your head is of Malfoy,” Harry muttered crossly.   
  
“What?” Ron peered at him.  
  
“Nothing.” Harry patted Ron on the back as he stood up. Ron was a good friend; a fortnight ago he’d had to spend three days in St. Mungo’s because he’d jumped in the path of a curse meant for Harry. Putting up with meanderings about Malfoy was a small price to pay. “But I’ll have to take the Malfoy case file back to Robards. They must have made some mistake. No one would ask us to protect him.”  
  
Ron grimaced and nodded. “Right. Because the Ministry gets embarrassed when we arrest murderers after acting as their bodyguards. So we’ll have to sneak in later and arrest him with good old-fashioned detective work!”  
  
“Sure,” Harry said kindly, and then walked off down the corridor, shaking his head.  
  
 _If he’d just get over this idiotic fear that’s holding him back and ask Hermione to marry him, then maybe he’d be less obsessed with someone who’s never hurt him since they were both schoolboys._  
  
*  
  
Harry stared at Robards, so flabbergasted that he found it hard to talk for a moment. But he shook his head and murmured at last, “You know Ron’s obsession with Malfoy, sir. I really don’t think it would be a good idea to depend on him to guard Malfoy’s life.”  
  
“Know that,” Robards said, in that abrupt manner of talking he had. Harry had to admit it suited his rugged face—unnaturally rugged, since a Dark curse had chipped off corners of his jaw and nose—and constant ferocious scowl. “Only suggested you for the case, and not Weasley. Malfoy named you specifically.”  
  
Harry blinked. “But, sir, without a partner, Ron is—” Perhaps the Muggle metaphor of the “loose cannon” would have fit an unpartnered Ron best, except that Harry didn’t think it conveyed an adequate sense of fire, smoke, and screams.  
  
“Weasley’s on desk duty for however long it takes you to resolve the Malfoy case.” Robards leaned towards Harry and lowered his voice. “Tell you the truth, it’s the only thing I can think of that’ll bring him to his senses.” And he winked significantly.  
  
Harry stared again, but then smiled. It appeared that he wasn’t the only one who had connected Ron and Hermione’s obsessions to their shared sexual repression.   
  
“I understand, sir,” he said. “Do I break the news to him, or—”  
  
“Malfoy wants you on duty as soon as possible,” Robards said, putting his hands behind his head. “Break the news myself. Off you go.”  
  
Harry nodded and jogged out of the office, reading the file as he went. Malfoy’s details on the threats were vague, coy to the point of being unhelpful. Harry sighed.  _Well, I reckon I can ask what’s going on when I see him._    
  
*  
  
“Watch out, Potter! The floor—”  
  
Harry heard the warning too late.   
  
He’d been told to go to Malfoy Manor to meet Malfoy, and he’d been unable to find him in the entrance hall, the library, the bedrooms that the house-elves were willing to admit him to, or any of the rooms that looked as if they were made to receive visitors. So he’d wandered over to the new wing, and heard Malfoy shout absently for him to come in when he’d called his name.   
  
The room, just inside the wall that surrounded the new wing, was enormous, and had a shining white ceiling, white floor, white walls, and a silver-edged opening in the roof that looked out onto a dazzling black nothingness. Harry stepped in and tilted his head back, gaping.  
  
And then his feet went out from under him, because the floor was apparently Transfigured from ice. Harry braced himself to hit.  
  
He hit nothing except a pair of strong arms, and then he was drooping over the arms like he was a woman in one of the extreme kinds of dances. Harry took a deep, huffing breath and peered up at his savior.  
  
Malfoy looked back at him, his face not  _quite_  wearing an amused smile, his eyes not  _quite_  shining with merriment.  
  
“Looks like I’m sweeping you off your feet, Potter,” he chuckled.  
  
The words of the horoscope from that morning came back into Harry’s mind, and he could shake his head and laugh, too. He was glad he had the laughter to counter an overactive imagination when Malfoy set him back on his feet and then touched his shoulder to smooth out the wrinkles in his robes. His hand did  _not_  linger, almost stroking, for one moment, because the men Harry liked in a quiet sort of way never liked him back. And that wasn’t what Harry was here for.  
  
He cleared his throat and moved away from Malfoy, though he kept his eyes on him. It was easier than trying to look around the dazzling room. “What exactly is this going to be?” he asked.  
  
“It’s a blank at the moment.” Malfoy looked modest when Harry peered at him in confusion. “A new style of wizarding architecture. The basic form of the room is laid out first, and then magic is brought in through an established gate to wizardspace to Transfigure it to one’s specifications.”  
  
“Then that only makes my question more relevant,” Harry said. “What is it  _going_  to be?”  
  
Malfoy blinked at him so hard that Harry thought he’d said something wrong. Then he chuckled again. “Why, Potter, that was almost charming.”  
  
“I’ve learned  _something_  about relating to other people, after having been an Auror for five years,” Harry said dryly, and then moved on. He’d found it didn’t do to let people consider his charm, or lack of it, too long. Facile remarks and jokes weren’t the same as true tact, the kind that Kingsley had. “So?”  
  
“That depends,” said Malfoy, his face thoughtful. “I still haven’t decided on the ideal look for the wing, you see. What do you think, Potter? Would you rather enter a room to be with your friends first, or a private space where you could hang your cloak up on the wall and relax?” He turned and pinned Harry with an odd, intent look.  
  
Harry blinked, wondered if he should give up the choice for fear of saying something that would offend Malfoy, and then decided that it wasn’t an important enough question for his answer to matter. They were only making small talk, after all, until Harry could move on to the more important question of who was sending Malfoy the threats. “A public space first,” he said. “I don’t like people passing through my private spaces, and they’d have to if this one was right next to the front door.”  
  
Malfoy blinked as if he’d never heard anything so sensible. Then he murmured, “You don’t allow  _anyone_  into those private spaces? Not even the lovers that I’ve written so many columns about?”  
  
The sharpness in his voice on the last words made Harry give him a narrow glance. Malfoy’s face was bland, but still… “You know as well as I do how many of those columns are only written to sell newspapers,” he said. “And if you’re worried about my bringing a lover over on the job, rest assured I would  _never_ —”  
  
“No, I have no reason to doubt your professionalism,” Malfoy said, with a little sigh in his voice that Harry didn’t understand. He turned around, and Harry noticed only then he was wearing a set of mouse-grey robes that, for some reason, went nicely with both his hair and his eyes. “Well, come with me, and we can discuss your quarters and my schedule.”  
  
“And the threats you’re getting,” Harry pointed out helpfully as he trailed behind Malfoy.  
  
There was only a slight check in the long stride, but then Malfoy glanced over his shoulder and nodded. His hair, bleached almost to the color of dandelion fluff by time out in the sun, brushed and rustled along his cheeks. “Of course.”  
  
 _Interesting. Is there something about the threats that he doesn’t want to tell me?_  Harry decided to set himself to work to dig them out. He’d learned patience as well as tact in the last five years. It had taken  _enormous_  amounts of tact to get several of his instructors to accept that he was ready to get out of training.  
  
*  
  
 _You’ve long wanted something that you’ve resigned yourself to seeing only in incredible dreams. But this is the day dreams come true! Just be sure not to miss lunch, or that dream might take flight._    
  
Harry rolled his eyes and snorted. “Well, the first part sounds normal again, but the mention of lunch is still odd,” he muttered, and put the  _Prophet_  down.  
  
“What was that?”  
  
Malfoy somehow managed to look perfectly impeccable in the  _morning_ , which Harry was sure ought to be illegal. He wore a set of cream-colored robes today, with fugitive hints of blue, and he was studying his own paper with attention. Probably looking for misspelled words in his column, Harry thought; Malfoy had explained last night to him, with great emphasis and detail over the wine he’d insisted that Harry share, what misguided and abominable beasts most printers were.  
  
“The horoscope,” Harry said, and swallowed his last bite of toast as he considered his plans for the day. Malfoy hadn’t given him that much detail about the threats yet, and seemed to assume he could continue his normal life—appearing at parties and interviews, writing, and corresponding by owl from his relatively undefended office—whilst Harry guarded him. “The Leo horoscopes have been weirdly specific the last few days.”  
  
Malfoy laughed. The sound seemed to reach into Harry’s chest and find bits of happiness hiding there that he’d never seen. He lowered his head to his plate again, even though there was nothing left, hoping to hide some of his flush. “That’s Bethany Helser. She does love to insert odd sentences from the novel she claims she’s writing. She says it’s the only way someone will ever read some of her ‘true passion,’ and she’s very tragic about it.” Malfoy shook his head and stood up. “Are you ready to leave?”  
  
Harry scrambled awkwardly to his feet, wondering again why Malfoy had requested him. He was out of place in the magnificent dining room, which looked as if it were decorated with every kind of expensive wood, stone, and metal in existence.   
  
 _But you’re the best Auror at bodyguard work, and that’s what matters_ , he told himself. “I think that you should reconsider leaving the house, Malfoy. Surely it won’t make much difference if you write your columns at home for a few days, or do your interviews by firecall.”  
  
“It makes a difference to people like Celestina Warbeck,” Malfoy said sharply, arranging a row of golden buttons on his robe, “who thinks it’s an insult if someone doesn’t beg fifty times for a guaranteed invitation.”  
  
“Warbeck?” Harry shook his head. “Didn’t you just cover her a week ago?”  
  
“New song coming out,” Malfoy said, with a deadpan expression that made Harry smile. “You wouldn’t  _believe_  how important.” He fluttered his eyelashes, then abruptly became sober again. “But I refuse to let some crazy stalker control my life.”  
  
“A stalker?” Harry pounced on this information, which was more than Malfoy had given him last night. Harry knew he should have been more forceful and  _demanded_  the details, but firelight turned Malfoy golden and wine loosened his tongue, and it was a bit much for someone with a crush on him to resist. “How is he crazy? Or she? What are the letters they’re sending you like?”  
  
“ _Uninteresting_ , Potter.” Malfoy shook his head in irritation. “They say all the usual things.”  
  
“Like what?” Harry asked, and frowned back when Malfoy frowned at him. “No matter what you may think, there is some variation in craziness, Malfoy. Threatening to kill you is different from saying that someone wants to spend the rest of his life with you and is perishing for a sideways glance from you.”  
  
Malfoy smiled, and Harry found out that a single expression could dissolve his belly. “Why, Harry,” he said. “You sound especially fluent on those last words. Are those by any chance coming from experience?”  
  
 _I’ve felt that, though I’ve never written a letter like that_ , Harry had the insane temptation to answer. But because it was insane and he was rational, most of the time—someone had to be, caught in the crossfire of Ron and Hermione’s passion for each other—he managed to raise an eyebrow and say, “I’m not granting you anything that might reappear in your column. Now, which category are we dealing with?”  
  
“The claims of eternal love and all that rot.” Malfoy rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t have called the Aurors at all, but I was promised an interruption during an interview.”  
  
“Do you  _need_  protection, then?” Harry couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had thought Malfoy had changed, at least enough not to call on Auror protection when he didn’t require it. “If I could be helping someone else, someone who’s in danger of more than losing a few readers—” He shook his head and stepped back.  
  
Malfoy reached out to catch his arm, his eyes wide and oddly panicked. Even that look made him adorable. Harry hissed under his breath.  _My crush is getting out of control._  
  
“I’ll show you the letters after the Warbeck interview,” Malfoy said, rushing through his words. “And I do think there’s something off about them, mainly because of the way they’re written. I make my living writing, remember? I can analyze words. I haven’t wanted to show them to you before because I didn’t want to think about it, but I need—I mean, I do want Auror protection.” He swallowed and looked at the floor. “I didn’t want to think about it,” he repeated, low enough that Harry could hardly hear him.  
  
Harry found it far too easy to forgive him. But then, he’d run into this before, too, people who actively went about in denial that their lives were in danger. At least Malfoy had called in help before it was too late.  
  
“It’s all right,” he whispered, and found himself stroking Malfoy’s shoulder without realizing when that had started to happen. “I believe you.”  
  
Malfoy looked up at him with an expression of gratitude that heated and turned his eyes a darker grey. Harry swallowed and stared, enchanted, before tearing his gaze away.  
  
“Thank you,” Malfoy whispered, and caught Harry’s hand, his fingers rubbing down the palm. “That means the world to me.”  
  
Oddly enough, Harry had the impression that he was talking not about the protection, but about Harry’s belief in him.  
  
 _Which is strange_.  
  
 _But then, what about my life is normal these days?_  
  
*  
  
“And of course Caroline has lunch ready for us. Caroline!”  
  
 _Lunch. Thank God_. Harry didn’t think he could take one more minute of Malfoy interviewing Celestina Warbeck, no matter how good the Auror training had been that allowed him to keep a polite smile frozen on his face.  
  
It wasn’t just  _one_  thing that made it so intolerable. If it had only been Warbeck’s giggle, or the way she fluttered her eyelashes at Malfoy, or the horrible pink spiked array of her hair, or the flirtatious glances she cast at Harry sometimes, or the blue-and-white china brightness of her house, or the thousand and one times she described herself as “modern” and “fresh” and “reinvented,” then he could have borne it.  
  
But  _all together_? This was a new definition of hell, one that Harry thought even Umbridge wouldn’t have dreamed up to inflict on her students.  
  
Now, though, that part of the interview was over, and Caroline, Warbeck’s human maid—“I won’t use house-elves, so vulgar, and they can never keep themselves  _clean_ , don’t you find that, Draco dear?”—was laying lunch across the table. Malfoy was still asking questions about the new song as he stood up, and so Harry was resigned to the interview continuing throughout the meal. But at least with food on the table, he would have something else to concentrate on.  
  
And for twenty minutes or so, that worked fairly well. Harry closed his eyes in spite of himself as he ate his way through a crisp salad, and then he decided it wouldn’t be too rude to take a second one of the delicious ham sandwiches that lay on the platter in front of him.  
  
Yes, everything was going splendidly.  
  
Until Malfoy’s foot ran up his leg.  
  
Harry choked on his sandwich, then coughed hard enough that he had to lay it down. Warbeck looked at him in mild irritation. “I’m sure that you  _can’t_  choke on  _that_  sandwich,” she said. “Caroline made it specially to be soft and easy to swallow.”  
  
Harry would have answered, except Malfoy—seated beside Warbeck, so that she couldn’t see his face when she was looking at Harry—caught his eye then and mouthed the words, “easy to  _swallow_ ,” with a wicked twist of emphasis that made him want to fall apart. Harry cleared his throat and looked away, reaching blindly for the crystalline glass of water that sat next to his plate. His fingers struck it in the middle, and he had to work to keep it from falling.  
  
“My, my,” Warbeck said, in a loud whisper that Harry was obviously meant to hear. “So  _clumsy_. Not what one would have expected of a war hero and Auror at all. Don’t they need to be coordinated, to run after Dark wizards along rugged ground?”  
  
“You’re the real athlete, Celestina dear,” Malfoy said, with every appearance of sincerity. “How many octaves  _did_  you cover in that song?”  
  
Warbeck blushed and simpered, and Harry cast Malfoy a warning glance. Malfoy gave him a scintillating, shining look back, so deep that Harry tried hastily to hide his blush in his sandwich, which made him cough again, which made Warbeck scold him again and appeal to Malfoy about the lack of manners in young people. Harry made a private promise not to buy any more of her albums, not even as gifts for Ginny. Malfoy solemnly agreed that lack of training in manners was a great shame, and slid his left hand back and forth along Harry’s thigh beneath the table.  
  
At least he winced when Harry reached down and pinched the back of his hand. Harry was satisfied. Ron had taught him to pinch like that, after he’d used the tactic to escape a Death Eater who had him pinned.   
  
But then Malfoy brought his foot into play again, and Harry couldn’t do anything about it without upsetting the whole table.  
  
Malfoy, it seemed, knew things about music that only trained performers did. He kept Warbeck laughing and chattering at that meal for far longer than was necessary, until Harry had also promised never to provide bodyguard duty to anyone with the name of Malfoy again, no matter how much he needed it.  
  
And then Malfoy was saying, “It was a  _lovely_  interview, Celestina, thank you for inviting us,” and holding out his hand, as if Harry needed his help in rising to his feet like some helpless toddler. Harry gave him a sharp glance, which Malfoy returned with a heated one,  _again_. Harry deliberately cast a spell that caused his erection to subside and ignored the offered hand as he stood up.  
  
“Of course, Draco.” And Warbeck clucked her tongue and shook her head at Harry. “ _You_  might consider taking a few lessons in politeness and handling true celebrity gracefully before you’re around it again, Harry dear.”  
  
Harry held in a deep breath and began repeating a single thought in a steady chant to himself.  _I will not turn Celestina Warbeck into a toad, I will not turn Celestina Warbeck into a toad…_  
  
The moment they were out in the street, he turned to Malfoy and said, “Don’t  _ever_  do that again.”  
  
Malfoy’s eyes were full of such amusement that he looked as if he might burst. And then he actually  _wriggled in place_ , like an excited puppy, and Harry told himself that was  _not_  cute just because he was attracted to the git. “I’m afraid I rather have to,” he said, voice still too low, eyes still too bright. “It’s rather my job, you see.”  
  
“Don’t  _flirt_  with me in front of an interviewee, then.” Harry turned away sharply. “And I notice there was no threat directed at you the entire time we were there.”  
  
“That’s because I had a big, strong Auror with me,” Malfoy said happily. “And really, would you have missed lunch for anything? That was like a dream come true. Such good food, such good company…”  
  
Harry knew a smoldering glance would be waiting for him if he wanted to meet it. He didn’t care. He gritted his teeth and focused his eyes straight ahead, and Malfoy hummed under his breath and then apparently decided to change the subject.  
  
“What’s your favorite color, Potter?”  
  
Harry turned to scowl at him. “Was this something from the letters?” he demanded. “Remember that you were going to show me the letters.”  
  
Malfoy grinned like an idiot, which made him the intellectual equal of the people who ignored Harry’s tone when he spoke like that. “Can’t a bloke make ordinary conversation about semi-important subjects?”  
  
Harry ran a hand through his hair. “Fine,” he said in a hiss. “I don’t have a single favorite color. I like various shades of green, various shades of red and gold— _and don’t start about loyalty to Gryffindor_ —and a few colors of blue, and sometimes white. In accents. And also bits of purple.”  
  
Malfoy stayed silent so long that Harry wondered if he had actually been kidnapped away from his side and Harry hadn’t noticed. They were only a few strides from the Apparition point, and it wouldn’t be a bad place for someone to strike if they were intent on kidnapping Malfoy instead of killing him. Harry turned around, body already starting to fall into a fighter’s crouch.  
  
Then Malfoy caught his eye and smiled.  
  
And, just as had happened the day that Ron and Harry visited him in his office, the sensation of their gazes meeting sent a spark of sharp pain through Harry’s brain. He flinched and backed away, shaking his head.  
  
“What’s wrong?” Malfoy sounded solicitous, and stepped towards him, his hand lifted as if he would touch Harry’s temple.  
  
“It’s nothing.” Harry knew his words sounded stilted, but really, he didn’t want or need Malfoy’s pity. “Let’s get home so you can show me those letters.”  
  
“Why, Harry.” Malfoy’s voice dropped into truly disturbing registers. “I didn’t recall inviting you to think of the Manor as home. Are you always this free with your assignments’ living quarters?” He looked absolutely delighted, the flush high across his cheeks and his eyes shining to match Dumbledore’s.  
  
“I can see why someone would want to murder you,” Harry said darkly.  
  
Malfoy tossed his head back with a laugh.  _Something_  had put him in a good mood, but Harry had no idea what. Certainly he wouldn’t call his own grammatical fumbles that amusing, let alone the distasteful interview with Warbeck. Harry waited patiently until he stopped laughing, and then cast a spell that would detect any Dark Arts about. Interestingly, they identified one of the glamours on Warbeck’s house as illegal, but nothing else nearby. Harry shook his head.  
  
“Yes,” Malfoy said, and stopped laughing to give him a surprisingly soft smile. Harry rolled his eyes. The man probably knew of Harry’s attraction to him and thought it funny to flirt and make silent promises that of course he would never act on. Maybe the smile was his way of apologizing, though. “Yes, let’s go home.”  
  
And then he walked to the Apparition point and Apparated out as though nothing was wrong.  
  
Harry muttered under his breath, imagined Malfoy’s perfect little mask dissolving if he was there to hear just  _what_  Harry muttered, and then followed.  
  
*  
  
 _There’ll be something special waiting for you in your bedroom tonight, if you’re patient and stay awake until midnight._  
  
For once, it satisfied Harry to know that the stupid horoscope in the paper that morning was wrong—had to be wrong, because at the moment he was sneaking along the corner of Malfoy Manor in pursuit of an elusive shadowy figure he’d seen from his window. Nothing  _else_ about the day had gone right.  
  
Malfoy had “lost” the threatening letters that he’d acquired, but had said cheerfully that another one was sure to be delivered that day. Then he’d sat in his office writing all morning. From time to time, he would look up to give Harry another one of those deep glances and brilliant smiles. Harry appreciated them on a level he wished he could deny existed, but whenever he scowled back to let Malfoy know this was Serious Auror Business, Malfoy would chuckle and go back to polishing up his copy.  
  
Then they’d spent the afternoon at yet another boring interview, this one with a wizard who was actually about forty but had been hit with an Aging Curse during the first war with Voldemort, which afflicted him with all the physical problems of a wizard of thirty years older—including a wandering memory. Malfoy wanted to write a “human interest” story about “a dying war veteran.” In vain, Harry had tried to point out that the wizard was not  _really_  a seventy-year-old war hero. Malfoy had pointed out that no one who regularly read his column would care, and patiently listened to the same story six times.  
  
Then had come dinner, at which Malfoy held out numerous portions of food to Harry on his fork, and said  _nothing at all_. Harry had finally been rude, in a way that would cause Robards to pull him off the case if he knew. But each time, Malfoy leaned back in the chair and smirked as if he knew something Harry didn’t.  
  
Harry couldn’t imagine what that would be. He knew that Malfoy knew about his little crush, and obviously he’d chosen to exploit it for the embarrassment factor. But that was hardly a  _secret_  by this point.  
  
Harry was glad to get into his bedroom, cast some reinforcement spells, and work off his frustration with several dueling hexes. Then he’d looked out the window, seen the figure creeping along, and decided that today wasn’t a total wash, after all.  
  
And  _there_  was the fleeting movement ahead of him that he’d been looking for. Harry smiled viciously and cast  _Levicorpus_  under his breath. The stalker flew up into the air with a yelp, hanging by his ankle. Harry jogged up to him, already imagining Robards’ commendation. It was rare that anyone doing bodyguard duty caught the problem witch or wizard so quickly and easily. Most of them were clever enough to stay out of sight—  
  
And then the figure cursed in a very familiar voice, and Harry came to a stop, staring up at him in shock. “ _Ron_?” he asked when he could speak.  
  
“Harry,” Ron said, and bobbed his head at him. “So I was right. That bastard Robards did assign you here. Ha!” He punched the air with his fist in triumph, but since he was hanging upside-down, this only caused his robe to billow oddly and then fall over his face. Harry put a hand over his own face, massaging with his fingertips between his eyes. Yes, even without the scar able to affect him like it had before, this was going to be a monstrous fucker of a headache.  
  
“Ron, what are you doing here?” Harry asked, once he thought he had the calmness of mind back so that he wouldn’t scream the Manor down.  
  
“Sneaking around trying to find out Malfoy’s crimes, of course.” Ron lowered his voice, which was a bad thing, since his words were already so muffled by the robe that Harry now found it hard to understand him. “Did you know that I saw him putting on this slinky pale robe through his window a minute ago? Obviously he’s about to go into the new wing he’s building and corrupt an unwilling virgin. His wing must be the center of all his criminal activities. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before.” Ron shook his head in amazement.  
  
“Ron,” Harry said in a fragile voice, “Malfoy is  _not_  a criminal.”  _Unless being infuriatingly attractive and willing to make fun of someone for being attracted to him is a crime, which it should be_ , his mind ended unhelpfully. But Ron would be utterly unable to comprehend that Harry liked Malfoy in any way, which was one of the reasons Harry had never mentioned it to him; he didn’t want to deal with weeks of blank stares and endless outbursts, of “What?” “You’re not going to find anything. Go home, and go to bed. Preferably a bed with Hermione in it,” he added, fed up with coy references.  
  
Ron made a gasping sound, not inconsistent with having opened his mouth and inhaled some of his robe. “What?” he asked, coughing. “Mate, did you say something about Hermione?”  
  
“Yes, I did,” Harry said. “Go fuck Hermione. Go ask her to marry you. Go ask her to be your live-in lover. I  _don’t care_. Just get the fuck out of here, Ron, and stop thinking about Malfoy. He’s an unhealthy obsession of yours.”  _Next to which my own unhealthy obsession looks like the small pile of shit it really is._  
  
“Harry, I’m surprised at you.” Ron sounded deeply shocked. “If I go away and you go back to guarding Malfoy, who’s going to save the unwilling virgin?”  
  
Harry, fed up beyond measure, made a highly illegal Portkey out of one of Malfoy’s carnations and pinned it to Ron’s robe. Ron vanished back to his house in mid-sentence, as he busily planned a raid on Malfoy’s new wing. Harry rolled his eyes and turned back to his own bedroom.  
  
Of course, it was possible that Ron had really seen Malfoy dressing in the kind of robe that he would receive a lover in. And if he had, so bloody what? It was none of Harry’s business, unless Malfoy was idiot enough to leave the house and head to a rendezvous with someone who could turn out to be his stalker.  
  
If the stalker existed. Harry was beginning to assume it, he, or she didn’t.  
  
When he got back to his bedroom, he was exhausted enough to tumble into bed immediately and close his eyes. The last thought running through his head before his consciousness dimmed was,  _See, horoscope? It’s twelve-thirty now, and nothing unusual happened._  
  
He did hear something, once, that sounded like knocking on a door, but that was part of a long and complicated dream where Malfoy meant the sweet nothingness he was whispering to Harry, so he didn’t pay any attention.  
  
*  
  
Harry rolled his eyes and leaned against the door of Malfoy’s home office, thoroughly bored. Malfoy was irritated with him for some reason. He kept snapping at Harry all through breakfast, calling him “late,” and then refused to allow Harry in the same room as he was whilst he worked on the column about the wizard hit by the Aging Curse. Harry had compromised by casting every detection spell he could think of on the room, so it would alert him if anyone else or any Dark magic entered it, and then standing outside the door.  
  
To distract himself, Harry decided to think about the horoscope in the paper that morning. Once again, it had been specific, though how well it would work as a line in an unpublished novel, Harry couldn’t see. Perhaps the whole thing was written in second person.  _Your dreams still have a chance of passing you by. But when you fall sprawling, perhaps you’ll see your most desired lover from a new angle and understand the true potential of acting more freely. After all, you’ve always been so uptight, haven’t you?_  
  
Or maybe that was dialogue that one character said to another, Harry thought, stifling a yawn. Not very natural dialogue. He didn’t think he’d be interested in reading Bethany Helser’s book even if she did get it published.  
  
 _Maybe the main character writes horoscopes for a living._  
  
Suddenly, the detection spells went mad, causing red clouds of light to blaze in front of Harry’s eyes and bells to wail in his head. He leaped to his feet and whirled towards the door, knocking furiously. “Malfoy!” he yelled. “Malfoy, are you all right?”  
  
“Come quickly, Harry!”  
  
Harry battered the door open with his shoulder, charged into the room—  
  
And tripped over something invisible to fall sprawling on the floor. He looked up, blinking.  
  
Only to realize one of the reasons Malfoy had wanted to be alone. He was wearing a transparent robe, and his legs were barely crossed, his cock hanging heavy and full and half-erect. Harry glanced away at once, and hoped that his flush wasn’t bright enough to set the carpet on fire. Malfoy must have used the morning to write a letter to his lover, probably wanking on the way.  
  
Then the detection spells yelled at him again, and Harry sprang to his feet. “What happened?” he asked, spinning in a circle and casting a net of shields as he went, so that Malfoy would have a defense against attacks from any corner of the room.  
  
“An owl, with a new letter.” Malfoy’s voice was low. Harry prayed it wasn’t with arousal. “It’s over there on the windowsill.”  
  
Harry went to retrieve the envelope. The owl blinked up at him, and hopped tamely enough to his hand. Harry frowned at it. It was a small brown bird, a generic post owl. He would have thought a stalker would want to use a more threatening owl, maybe like the eagle-owl Malfoy had once had to deliver his parcels in Hogwarts. But then again, there were advantages to using a bird that no one could trace. “Does the same bird always bring it?” he asked, as he unhooked the envelope and searched in his robe pocket to find a stale treat he could offer.  
  
“No.” Malfoy’s voice had returned to the high-pitched irritation he’d used to dismiss Harry to guard duty on the door that morning. “It’s always a post owl, but sometimes they’re larger, and sometimes they come decorated with ribbons and bells.” He shifted back and forth, and uttered a very loud sigh. Harry ignored him so that he could cast more detection spells on the envelope.  
  
Nothing, and nothing. To all appearances, it was an ordinary envelope that contained a single sheet of thin paper. Harry at last laid the letter on the windowsill and used a Slitting Spell to open it. The sheet of parchment he manipulated to float in front of him and unfold on its own, so that he could read it safely.  
  
 _Dearest Draco_ , said the salutation, with a lot of spots, as though the writer had sat there with the ink dripping from the quill whilst they’d considered the next words.  
  
 _I’ve often wondered what we would be like together. I’ve often pictured you in your nakedness, shining like the moon was trapped inside your skin, your limbs svelte and shining with sweat. Would you roll on top of me and lick along my neck? Would you taste of salt, and wonder, and musk, and honey?_  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows. He could see why an unsolicited comment like this might annoy Draco, but there was no trace of the craziness that Draco had told him was detectable through the letters.  
  
On the other hand, maybe they started out normal and became mad later on. He plowed through the next paragraph.  
  
 _Or would you taste like something else, some alien flower crowned with shining nectar?_  (Harry noted absently that the writer really liked the word “shining”; it was underlined each time it appeared).  _And then, when you embraced me, would the musk transfer to my skin, and replace my own natural scent? I rather hope so. I am content with embracing you, but I am not content with my natural scent. I want something more. I want to mix with you, to become molten into you._  
  
A little more promising as far as madness went, but Harry still wouldn’t have called this a letter from a stalker frightening enough to require protection. Perplexed, he glanced at Draco, and then saw that he’d risen and lifted a leg over the desk, so that his groin was more visible than ever. Harry swallowed and looked back at the letter, but there was nothing for the signature except a question mark. Harry rolled his eyes.  _It’s as though someone wrote this from a generic template, with no idea of what a threatening letter is really supposed to sound like._    
  
“Well, I can see why you aren’t very worried about this writer, if this is typical of the letters you receive,” he said dryly, and pushed the letter back into the envelope with a flick of his wand. He knew that Robards would want to take a look at it; from the sound of it, Malfoy hadn’t sent any samples of the threatening letters to the Auror Office. “On the other hand, why did you call in protection, if you aren’t worried?” He pushed his hair back from his scar and looked inquiringly at Malfoy, focusing on his nose instead of the, er, the other long and straight part of his body he wanted to focus on.  
  
Malfoy shut his eyes and moaned softly. “So many attempts,” he said. “And it’s fruitless.  _Fruitless_. I ask them to send me the best Auror in the Department. They send me the dumbest one.”  
  
“If you’re prefer to send me away and have someone else come in—” Harry began, teeth clenched. He would not be rude to Malfoy, no matter the temptation. He’d already acted unprofessional enough on this case.  
  
Malfoy snapped his eyes open and waved a hand at Harry. “No, I still want you around,” he said. “I just happen to be hacked off at you right now. Go away, would you?”  
  
Harry cast one more detection spell on the room, shook his head, and went out, taking the letter with him.  
  
He’d occupy himself in writing to Robards and explaining the situation. And maybe then, Malfoy could have his wank in peace.  
  
 _Too bad I won’t get the chance_ , he thought, wistfully, and for the first time acknowledged why he’d like it, by pressing a hand into his crotch in the hope that he would calm down. Unexpected glimpses of Malfoy’s—heirlooms—could apparently do that to him.

*

“Potter! A visitor for you.”  
  
Harry looked up and blinked. He’d been patrolling the Manor gardens for some break in the wards that might allow anyone to get through. He couldn’t necessarily  _repair_  breaches he found, since so many of the wards were linked to Malfoy as the caster, but he was good at recognizing them.  
  
 _If it’s Ron again, I’m going to kill him_ , he decided, and trotted back through the open French window that led into the rose garden, then through the twisting maze of corridors to the front door. He was lucky the Auror Department had become its own smaller, nested labyrinth, or he’d have trouble navigating Malfoy Manor. Malfoy, of course, had offered him no guidance; he seemed to think that Harry should take more interest in the new wing he spent all his time in.  
  
“I decided I could help you,” Hermione said, stepping through the front door and rudely ignoring Malfoy’s existence. Harry stifled a groan. That meant she’d found a new theory. “So I contacted Robards, and he agreed to it.”  
  
 _Well, shit_. That omitted the simplest way to get rid of the problem, which was to tell Hermione that she wasn’t welcome at the scene of a case without permission from the Head Auror. Harry sighed, rolled his eyes—Hermione was immune to that, having seen it so many times—and looked apologetically at Malfoy. “She’ll want to talk about psychoanalysis,” he murmured. “Sorry. You probably won’t want to listen to this.”  
  
Malfoy shook his head slowly, his eyes gleaming, and Harry’s heart sank. No doubt the bastard had picked up on Harry’s discomfort and had decided that this was his way to get revenge for Harry having seen his cock yesterday.  
  
“Psychoanalysis?” he said thoughtfully, rolling the word around in his mouth. “That’s a Muggle theory of understanding the mind, isn’t it?”  
  
“Yes, it is.” Hermione focused on a seemingly interested—and new—audience with the speed of Ron hiding his plans of Malfoy Manor under the desk when Robards walked by. “It focuses on the subconscious, on symbolism and on dreams.” She gave Harry a triumphant look. “I keep telling Harry that his dreams are symbolic, but he won’t listen to me. And he won’t acknowledge the brilliance of Freud. The Muggle who founded the theory,” she added, perhaps because Malfoy’s face had become blank.  
  
“Hermione,” Harry said, exasperated as he rarely was by her because she had shown up whilst he was on an  _investigation_ , “Freud thought that women had discovered weaving by studying the fabric of their  _pubic hair_.” He’d glanced into one of Hermione’s books once the last time he’d visited her flat. He thought the experience had scarred him for life.   
  
“One false step doesn’t mean he wasn’t brilliant otherwise.” Hermione waved her hand, and then drew a small, folded piece of paper out of her robe pocket. “And I’m going to  _prove_  that I know what I’m talking about by using something you can’t deny.”  
  
Harry blinked. She’d unfolded the  _Daily Prophet_ , which he hadn’t had time to read that morning because he was intent on keeping his breakfast with Malfoy short.  
  
“Hermione,” he said, “how can lies printed about me dating some witch or other help you psychoanalyze me?”  _Especially because it’s really two lies in one at this point, with the implication that I’m straight_.  
  
“I’m not relying on the lies. Well, they’re lies,” Hermione added, after a moment of conscientious consideration, “but  _you_  don’t think they are.” She flipped back the paper and pointed at the horoscope section with a vindicated smile.  
  
Harry peered closely at it, and didn’t manage to hold back his groan this time. The Leo horoscope was even more specific and suggestive this time.  _Are you a brave lion, ready to roar, or a coward who runs away with his tail tucked between his legs? Maybe you should face the man you love, take a deep breath, and tell him what_  else  _you’d like to have tucked between your legs_.  
  
“Helser must assume that everyone who reads the column’s female,” he muttered.  
  
“Oh, really?” Malfoy asked, in a soft, breathy voice.  
  
Harry cast him an alarmed glance. He’d drawn nearer, and reached out with one hand as though he was about to stroke Harry’s shoulder or something else equally ridiculous. His eyes were blazing now, not simply gleaming.  
  
“Look, Malfoy, if you’re gay, that’s fine,” Harry said. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Wait, that doesn’t even apply to you, does it? Your birthday’s in June, so you must be some other sign. Um, let’s see—”  
  
“Gemini,” Malfoy said, with the same sort of breathlessness. “I’m Gemini. The sign of the twins. I might be divided in my mind, or I might be more than you imagine. You never know.” He was still stepping closer to Harry, his eyes still bright, still wide.   
  
“I’ll psychoanalyze you later,” Hermione told him, and seized Harry’s hand. “Now, Harry,” she said, and hauled him across the corridor into one of the furnished sitting rooms, neat as you please. Harry was aware of the dirt dropping from his boots and robe all the way. But Malfoy followed them, looking amused instead of indignant about the mess on his carpets.  _Well, he has house-elves to clean it up_ , Harry thought.  
  
But the house-elves were no reason for Malfoy to sit down on the same couch Harry chose, and so close to him, too. Harry gave him a piercing stare as a silent suggestion to back off. Malfoy was apparently rather good at being blind to celebrity body language when he chose to, though. He beamed at Harry and sank back against the couch, resting his shoulder firmly against his.  
  
“Now,” Hermione said, and snapped the paper again. “I think it’s very interesting that you looked at this horoscope and immediately assumed that it must refer to a female reader, Harry. That suggests some problematic aspects of your own comfort with your sexuality.”  
  
“I am perfectly comfortable with my sexuality,” Harry said between gritted teeth.  _Unless you think of my sexuality as sitting right next to me and touching me inappropriately._  
  
Hermione paid no attention whatsoever. “Freud would suggest that you had homosexual fantasies by your very vehemence to deny any such thing,” she said. “I don’t know that I would go quite  _that_  far, but it’s suggestive.” She looked up at him. “When was the last time you had anal sex, Harry?”  
  
Harry’s brain froze. “ _What_?” was all he could get out, and that in a strangled squawk.  
  
“Yes,” Malfoy murmured into his ear, with the voice of an incubus. “Do tell us, Harry.”  
  
Hermione rattled on, seeming not to care that Harry had Malfoy’s breath on the side of his face and that Malfoy’s hand was now creeping down to rest on his thigh. Harry held his breath and shifted sideways as much as possible.  _Merlin, you’d think he’d have had enough of revenge by now_. “I can see that you’re reluctant to answer the question. That involves a level of deep thought about anal sex that doesn’t fit the position it would hold in the minds of most people as a normal sexual practice.”  
  
Harry finally found his tongue. “No one would have a prompt answer to that question if you just blurted it out at them, Hermione,” he snapped.  
  
“I would,” Malfoy whispered.  
  
“No one  _normal_ , I mean,” Harry said loudly. “And I’ve never had anal sex. There. Are you happy?”  
  
Malfoy’s breath stuttered beside him. Harry rolled his eyes, not caring at the moment if Malfoy saw and said something to Robards.  _Pervert. He’s probably remembering the last time he did._    
  
Hermione gave him a knowing smile. “The question wasn’t limited to men, Harry,” she said. “After all, men can have anal sex with women, too, and we’re pretending that you’re straight. For the moment.” Her smile turned deeply amused.  
  
“The answer is still the same no matter what the combination of sexes is.” Harry stiffened for a moment, and in more than one way, as Malfoy’s hand fluttered towards his groin. Then Malfoy pulled it back, and Harry sighed with relief. Totally with relief, not with disappointment. “I’ve never had anal sex.”  
  
Hermione nodded. “But the idea must have been put into your mind by reading the horoscope,” she said.  
  
Harry wiped his mouth. Malfoy sat so closely pressed to him that his skin was heating up, and he was thirsty. Because he was hot and wanted something to drink, of course, not because his mouth was dry. “I didn’t read it this morning.”  
  
Hermione laid down the paper and stared at him incredulously. “Of all the reasons you could come up with to avoid psychoanalysis, that’s a weak one, Harry,” she said. “You read it  _every_  morning. You have as long as I’ve been interested in psychoanalysis, at least, which is why I can’t believe that I never thought of it as a tool to analyze you with before.” She paused. “Unless you glanced at it this morning, saw what it was about, and used your subconscious to construct a defense that would give you an excuse not to read it. And  _that_  is called an avoidance mechanism.”  
  
“It’s not—” Harry had to close his eyes with sheer frustration and wonder what the fuck had  _happened_  to his friends after the final battle. Maybe their respective obsessions were their way of coping with the stress of the war.  
  
 _Or maybe it’s all down to sexual repression and frustration, the way that Robards suggests._  
  
“Or transference,” Hermione suggested, and from the tone of her voice, Harry knew she was going to launch into a titanic explanation of transference.  
  
“Granger.” Malfoy’s voice was uncommonly polite, but from the way his fingers tightened on Harry’s thigh— _since when did his revenge involve putting his hand back there_?—he was annoyed. “Have you actually come to contribute anything to the investigation into my stalker, or have you only come to pester Harry?”  
  
 _Harry_? That made Harry uncover his eyes and stare at Malfoy. Malfoy was looking at Hermione, though, who blinked at him as if she thought he had ceased to exist whilst she talked to Harry.  
  
“You have a stalker?” she asked. “Is that true? Or is it a numinous psychodrama where the stalker represents the repressed trauma of your childhood?”  
  
Malfoy gritted his teeth, the first time Harry remembered seeing a gesture like that directed at someone who wasn’t him. He wondered idly why Malfoy could be so patient with Celestina Warbeck and not with Hermione.  
  
 _Well, he isn’t being paid for this part of it._  
  
“It’s true,” Malfoy said. “And I’ll thank you to leave my house now, before you upset my Auror protection any further.”  
  
 _A fat lot of protection I’m turning out to be, when I can’t find any breach in the wards or any Dark spells_ , Harry thought, but he felt grateful, although he knew he would probably have to get rid of Hermione by himself.  
  
When he turned around and opened his mouth, though, Hermione was staring in fascination at Malfoy. “I should have known,” she whispered. “Repression. This house practically  _screams_  of it. Clean lines everywhere, except in the new wing you’re building, and not a speck of dust.”  
  
“That’s the house-elves,” Malfoy began.  
  
Hermione shook her head, and this time her knowing smile was turned on Malfoy. “It’s the return of the repressed,” she said. “Paranoid fantasies. Delusions that place you at the center of the universe. And you’ve tried so hard to make it go away, and it won’t. I wonder how many of your cruel words over the years were motivated by desires that you thought were unacceptable. Poor Malfoy.” She gave him a pitying glance and stood up. “I’ll see if I can’t find a book that will help you.”  
  
And she practically skipped out of the room before Malfoy could say something one way or the other—the skip Harry recognized as entering her walk when she had a new research subject.  
  
Malfoy stared after her in silence for so long that Harry began to fear some sort of explosion. He quietly prepared to rise to his feet and pull away from Malfoy. He must have forgotten that he had his shoulder leaning against Harry’s and his hand on his thigh. It was the only explanation Harry could see for his stillness.  
  
“I wish there were still Time-Turners about,” Malfoy muttered in a dire voice, “so that I could take one and go back in time to prevent Granger from becoming—” He paused and glanced sideways at Harry, then sighed. When he went on, Harry had the distinct idea that he’d decided on something different from what he would have originally said. “From becoming interested in psychoanalysis.”  
  
“That’s gone on for three months now.” Harry decided there was no being diplomatic or subtle about this, and yanked himself free from Malfoy’s grip with a mighty pull. A normal person would have fallen sideways onto the couch, but Malfoy recovered himself and raised one eyebrow at Harry as if to ask what he was doing. Harry ignored this. “I hope she gets interested in something else soon.”  
  
“Three  _months_?” Malfoy asked. “And you’re still sane?” He paused. “As much as you ever were, I mean.”  
  
Harry smiled in spite of himself. No use pretending that he didn’t mind remarks like that from Malfoy as much as he would have from anyone else. Not that it would ever come to anything, with what Malfoy having a lover—a boyfriend?—and Harry admiring from a distance. “I’ll go back to investigating the wards.”  
  
Malfoy stooped and gathered up the  _Daily Prophet_  from the floor, where Hermione had left it in her excitement. Harry told himself there was absolutely no use in trying to peer at Malfoy’s arse, since he was sitting down and wouldn’t show it off anyway. “I think you should read the horoscope again,” he said, and solemnly extended the paper.  
  
Harry groaned. “Not you, too. I only do it as a diversion, something to laugh at, all right? I have no idea why everyone takes it more seriously than I do. None of you are Leos.” He crossly snatched the paper from Malfoy.  
  
Malfoy looked up and into his eyes, his smile once again teasing, his gaze deep. Harry stared back—  
  
And then flinched as a spark of pain seemed to explode behind his eyes. What  _was_  it with these painful looks from Malfoy?  
  
 _Maybe your own brain is trying to save you from a hopeless entanglement_ , he told himself, and then bobbed his head at Malfoy. “I’ll see you later. I should finish patrolling the gardens for intruders.”  
  
“Read the horoscope.” Malfoy unfolded to his feet, so quickly that Harry took a step back and put a hand on his wand.  _Auror instincts_. He would have apologized, but Malfoy didn’t even seem to notice. He reached out towards Harry as if he would grip his wrist, his voice sinking to the same hypnotic murmur he’d used to ask Harry about anal sex. “Please.”  
  
Harry gritted his teeth. “Maybe you think this is funny,” he said, deciding that he would have to address this head-on, “but I don’t.”  
  
“I have no idea what you mean.”  
  
And how many celebrities had fallen for the mask of blinking innocence Malfoy was presenting now, his eyes blinking and his forehead wrinkled up? Harry shook his head, keeping his eyes fastened on Malfoy’s face despite the temptation to flinch in case more pain came along at any moment. “You’re angry at me for interrupting your wank and maybe your love-letter writing yesterday,” he said. “I understand that. But I’m also here to do a job, and obstructing me, teasing me, because you know that I—I’m attracted to you—doesn’t help.”  
  
“I’m glad you can admit it,” Malfoy said, and his voice was soft and warm. Once again, he reached out as if he wanted to touch Harry.  
  
Harry dodged him, disgusted. “Teasing me like this is beneath you,” he said bluntly. “Or it ought to be. And I’m going to tell Robards to make sure I don’t have any more contact with you from the moment we catch the stalker.”  
  
He turned his back and marched, with dignity that he thought couldn’t be denied, in the direction of the garden. A glance over his shoulder—one he told himself he could permit because it was a  _small_  glance—showed Malfoy standing stock-still, his face looking as if he’d been slapped.  
  
 _So I can make an impression on him after all. I just have to be firm._  
  
Harry stepped out into the garden and applied himself vigorously to the wards. They were simple. They were understandable. They didn’t make him want to hurl himself against the wall and bang his head into a bloody pulp as Malfoy was doing.  
  
And he was  _not_  disappointed that Malfoy didn’t follow him and try to apologize or explain.   
  
He just wasn’t.  
  
*  
  
Harry gave an exhausted sigh and sat down at the dining room table, shaking his head. Then he decided that wasn’t enough and buried his head in his arms, giving a tiny moan of exhaustion.  
  
The case had been solved, and by nothing more than sheer chance, rather than the skilled investigation Harry would have liked to be able to say that he conducted. It was luck that Harry had glanced around as they left the home of Nathan Audley, three-time winner of the All-England Racing Broom Championship, and seen the dark-haired woman playing with a knife and staring at Malfoy with an expression of open longing on her face. If she had been paying attention to Harry instead, she could have ducked out of sight before he looked in her direction. But she hadn’t.  
  
 _Probably entranced by the nearness of the object of her affections_ , Harry thought wryly, and swiped his hair out of his eyes.  _I know what that feels like_.  
  
The woman had turned out to be Pansy Parkinson, of all people, who had admitted without much prompting that she’d sent the letters to Malfoy. “I didn’t want to frighten him,” she told Harry, her eyes wide with apparent sincerity. “I just wanted to let him know how much I love him, and how much he owes me.”  
  
Malfoy had given her an extremely long stare when she said those last words, which convinced Harry that any debt he owed Parkinson was another product of her deluded brain. Harry had sighed and taken her into the Auror Department and to Robards, who appeared pleased to have such a straightforward arrest.  
  
Then Harry had gone back to the Manor to get his belongings, only to find his bedroom door locked and Malfoy vanished with the key.  
  
So he’d taken a moment to relax at the table and try to come to terms with what had happened to him over the past few days.  
  
He was attracted to Malfoy. Fine. But it wouldn’t make anything happen, because Malfoy saw his attraction as a matter for teasing and because they belonged to different worlds. Harry couldn’t see himself ever feeling easy with someone who used a spell that caused pain when he looked at people and who interviewed celebrities by  _choice_.  
  
And then there was the obvious fact that Malfoy appeared to have a lover already, as well as more commitments competing for his attention than Harry was comfortable navigating among. His Auror job was demanding, too. How in the world would they be able to spend time with each other outside the confines of an investigation, even if they wanted to?  
  
Something landed on the table in front of him with a slap. Harry lifted his hand from one eye, and groaned when he saw the  _Daily Prophet_. “Take it away,” he begged Malfoy, who must be the one who’d dropped it. “I don’t want to read the stupid horoscope.”  
  
“Yes, you do,” Malfoy said, with a weirdly intense voice. “Because you didn’t read it this morning, and it isn’t stupid.”  
  
Harry leaned back in his chair to look up at him. Malfoy had his hands on his hips and was staring at Harry. Once again, he wore the pale, almost translucent robe he’d worn the day Pansy’s letter arrived. Harry sighed. “Go meet your boyfriend. Or your girlfriend. Or both at once. After you give me the key for my rooms,” he added belatedly. “The case is done.”  
  
“But my interest in you is by no means over with,” Malfoy said. His words could have bored holes in rock. He nodded to the paper. “Read the horoscope.”  
  
“No,” Harry said, feeling anger stir in him at last. He didn’t need to put up with the vagaries of someone whose life wasn’t in danger. He started to stand. “I don’t—”  
  
“Please,” Malfoy whispered.  
  
Harry blinked. If someone had asked him whether that word was in Malfoy’s vocabulary, he would have said no. But the yearning voice Malfoy spoke in, combined with the intense stare, made him reach out for the paper. Malfoy gave it to him with a brief touch of fingers in the middle of Harry’s palm that sparked all sorts of impossible fantasies.  
  
He looked at the horoscope for Leo.  
  
 _What you want is right in front of you. And he wants you back. His nature might be symbolized by a dragon, and his last name by good faith gone bad._  
  
Harry felt as though it took forever to lift his eyes from the page and direct them at Malfoy. Malfoy, who was looking nervous for the first time. Malfoy, who met his gaze directly but fidgeted whilst he did it.  
  
“You’ve been controlling what horoscopes they printed for me?” Harry whispered. “Or you’re involved in it. What—why?”  
  
“I was paying Bethany to put specific things in her column, yes,” Malfoy admitted. The fidgeting grew worse, until he was dancing from foot to foot. But Harry didn’t feel much urge to laugh at the moment. “Most of the people who read it are like you, doing it for a laugh anyway. Or they’ll roll their eyes and assume she’s just off for once. Or they’ll gasp and apply it to their own lives. I knew from the time you visited my office with Weasley that you read the horoscopes. I thought it would be a good, subtle way to slowly hint at my interest in you.”  
  
“I didn’t say anything about horoscopes when I visited your office with Ron,” Harry said suspiciously.  
  
Malfoy gave him an embarrassed smile. “Legilimency. I’m afraid you felt it. I’m not as good at it as Snape was.”  
  
Harry licked his lips. “So you found out that I read the horoscopes. And that I was attracted to you. And?”  
  
“And I decided that I needed to get in contact with you,” Malfoy said. “But without exposing too much of my own interest, because—” He winced. “I’ve always had problems with pride, Harry, I admit that. And writing this column, I’ve seen any number of people who let attention go to their heads and make them into petulant children. I thought you might be one of them, even though I didn’t think you were. So I tried the horoscopes. And the threatening letters, which I convinced Pansy to write, so that I would have a chance to get you in my house and use Legilimency more.”  
  
Harry surged to his feet. “Wasting Auror time is—”  
  
“I didn’t care,” Malfoy said, and his voice had become sharp. “I don’t care. It was you I wanted, not the entire Auror Department.”  
  
Harry caught his breath. The statement was immensely flattering, and so was the frustration on Malfoy’s face. He’d done what he could to get a more accurate look at Harry, and Harry had flung obstacles in his way without even knowing what he was doing. And he’d gone on trying, instead of giving up in disgust as he’d have every reason to do.  
  
“So,” Harry said, voice low, “you weren’t wanking at all when Parkinson’s letter arrived.”  
  
“No.” Malfoy examined him closely, as if he was trying to decide what Harry was feeling, and then smiled. The smile was small, but it was a beginning. “I was trying to make the horoscope come true that I sent to the paper that morning, about your sprawling in front of your most desired object and seeing him from a new angle. But I reckon horoscopes aren’t prophecies.”  
  
Harry shook his head. He had to bite his lip to keep from smiling. On one hand, what Malfoy had done was still underhanded and unnecessary. He could have asked Harry out, like a rational person.  
  
But his pride was a persuasive reason, and…  
  
It was a long time since Harry had had the sense that someone was paying attention to  _him_ , rather than to his solve rate on cases, or his scar, or the part that he played in their various obsessions.  
  
He moved closer to Malfoy, tentatively reaching out. Malfoy linked his fingers through Harry’s and tugged him so that they stood chest to chest with a force that made Harry pant.   
  
He tried to stop panting.  _I shouldn’t be doing this so soon after he admitted to trying to manipulate me._  
  
His body didn’t want to listen to him.  
  
“I’ve wanted you for—a while,” Malfoy murmured against his lips. Harry stretched his neck, then thought that looked like begging for a kiss. Malfoy didn’t seem to have noticed it, however. He reached out and ran the back of his hand down Harry’s cheek, his eyes as bright and deep as they’d been when he was flirting with Harry during the case. “But I was afraid to move. I wondered how serious my feelings could be, if I never tried to approach you. I knew that you would remember what we were like to each other in Hogwarts, and that made me hesitate, too.” He shook his head, wonder and pride mingled in his eyes. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t learned of your attraction to me with the Legilimency.”  
  
“What made you want me?” This time, Harry did not care if it sounded like he was begging for compliments.  
  
“A thousand instances,” Malfoy answered. “Seeing your photographs in the paper and how you kept trying to duck out of the frame. The way you got good at tasks that I used to think you’d decide were beneath you, like recognizing breaches in wards. The way your eyes flash when you’re angry.” He caught his breath and smiled. If that was intended to distract Harry from the way his cock was hardening against Harry’s leg, it failed. “And you?”  
  
“Because you stayed alive, and you changed,” Harry answered quietly, lifting his free hand to stroke his fingers through Malfoy’s hair, letting them rest briefly against the scalp and then moving them on. “I expected you to curl up after the war and die like an insect someone stepped on, you know.”  
  
Malfoy’s eyebrows rose, and his expression wavered between amused and insulted.  
  
“A lot of the pure-bloods did,” Harry reminded him. “They couldn’t deal with their beliefs being overturned, or with the fact that they’d backed the wrong side of the war. Remember that rash of suicides, and murder-suicides, that were reported five years ago?”  
  
Malfoy shuddered. “This is destroying the mood,” he murmured. “You were telling me why you came to desire me.”  
  
Harry smiled. There were some ways in which Malfoy  _hadn’t_  changed, and was still the schoolboy who expected to be pampered and indulged and amused. Harry could live with that, and with the exasperating behavior that Malfoy had shown him over the last few days. It was a nice continuity between past and present, if nothing else.  
  
“That was the beginning,” he said. “That you made a new career for yourself. Then I saw you were good at it.”  
  
“At something you must have hated,” Malfoy broke in. “Thank Merlin I had better sense than to try and interview you.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “No. You were better at it than Rita Skeeter, because you had a way of making the  _truth_  interesting, instead of spinning lies out of malice like she did. It was when I started thinking that I wouldn’t mind if you interviewed me that I knew I was falling hard.”  
  
“You wouldn’t mind if I interviewed you.” Malfoy’s fingers closed harder around his wrist. “An admirable sentiment, but too mild for my taste.”  
  
Harry looked up at him for a moment. Then he said, “I can’t vow undying love yet, and I’m still a bit angry about what you did .But I think I can say that you’re different than I thought you were—I like you better a little insecure—and that I’d very much like to go to bed with you.” This time, he moved forwards so that Malfoy could feel his own erection.  
  
Malfoy blinked, but luckily he did act on the suggestion Harry had made before Harry had to make it again. His hand slid from Harry’s wrist to the back of his head, touching skin all the way, and pulled him into a kiss as forceful and abrupt as that initial jerk.  
  
Harry gasped soundlessly with pleasure, then opened his mouth and sent his tongue sliding pointedly into Malfoy’s. “Malf—” he managed to say.  
  
Malfoy made an amused sound and lowered his mouth to Harry’s throat. “Is that really the way you think of me in your fantasies?” he murmured. “Call me Draco, Harry.”  
  
“Draco,” Harry whispered. It sounded natural when he tried it out, or at any rate more natural than he thought it might have—  
  
Then Draco’s mouth fastened in place, and he could gasp, “ _Draco_ ,” in all sincerity and dig his fingers into the other man’s arms.  
  
Draco went on kissing and nipping him for a few moments longer. Harry managed to look at him without his eyelids fluttering, and saw that  _his_  eyes were closed, as if he needed that much concentration for his task. One hand still clasped the back of Harry’s head; the other curled around his shoulders and drew him closer.  
  
Harry moved so that their cocks angled against each other, more than happy to rut right here. Draco tilted his head back, his lips parted, and gasped. His eyes were cloudy. Harry smiled and rocked faster.  
  
“Not like this,” Draco said thickly. “Not here,” he added, and stepped away, though his hands still wandered restlessly across Harry’s skin, so Harry didn’t have to think he’d lost interest. “I want to do this for the first time in a special place.”  
  
“What’s  _this_?” Harry asked, gripping Draco’s cock and rubbing his thumb along the head, whilst trying not to show how thrilled he was about the words “the first time.” That implied there would be many more.  
  
“Fucking you,” Draco said. “I’m going to put you in a very large bed decorated with your favorite colors and fuck you.” He spoke with the same intent seriousness he’d used to ask Warbeck about her new song, or Audley about how it felt to know he was winning the race.  
  
“My favorite colors.” Harry narrowed his eyes. “Exactly how many times did you use Legilimency on me?” Draco’s smile said he wouldn’t answer that. “And where is this bed?”  
  
*  
  
“This is your wing.”  
  
Harry found it hard to speak as he stepped into the room that had been a wizarding architect’s blank less than a week ago. The glaring, blinding white was gone now. Instead, muted shades of blue and green on the walls made him feel as if he were entering a sunken palace in Atlantis. The floor was blue tile, giving back dim reflections of both Harry and Draco. The room was green to complement it, but a duller shade of green, so that Harry wouldn’t get a headache when he looked at it. Large windows looked out on one garden and one enchanted scene of the rose garden, since that wasn’t visible from this angle of the Manor.  
  
And they were exactly the shades of the colors he liked.  
  
“How did you know?” he whispered, turning around to stare at Draco. “To make this an entrance hall—and you asked my favorite colors, but—”  
  
“More Legilimency.” Draco stepped forwards, his hands shaking slightly as he reached out to caress Harry’s shoulders. The shakiness endeared him to Harry more. It would have been obnoxious to have a lover who was completely confident about his every move, whilst Harry stumbled and fumbled along behind. “As for the entrance hall, I asked you when this was a blank what kind of room you would make it if you lived here. You said that it should be public, because you don’t like people walking through your private rooms.” He smiled down at Harry. “I started building this wing not knowing who it was for, but of course, once I realized I had a chance with you, I thought it would make a suitable lover’s gift. It had to be perfect, since it was going to be yours.”  
  
Harry swallowed. He really  _couldn’t_  speak now, and had to settle for pulling Draco hard against him, kissing him until Draco had clutched his shoulders hard enough to leave bruises and then half-sunk onto the tiles, his arms around Harry’s hips. He seemed willing to forget all about the bed.  
  
“I thought we were going to do this properly, the first time?” Harry murmured, and closed his hands into circles around Draco’s wrists, thrilled by the sense of his power. He’d dated only Ginny and a few other women. None of them had acted as if he had the power to bring them literally to their knees. When he imagined being with a man, it didn’t happen, either; he thought he would be the inexperienced one, having to lie back and accept guidance.  
  
 _Experience doesn’t mean perfect control_ , he thought smugly as he watched Draco’s brain take a full minute to catch up with the words.  
  
“Properly,” Draco gasped. “Yes.” He stood up, sliding his hands from Harry’s hips and up his flanks to his shoulders again. By the time he was fully on his feet, Harry panted too hard to maintain the smile. Draco grinned at him, but lost the grin a moment later, as if he needed the energy for other things. He gulped and dragged Harry towards a door visible on the far side of the entrance hall. “You need a tour of your wing.”  
  
“Later,” Harry said. He seized Draco’s wrists again. Then he had to stand there and make an effort to catch his breath whilst Draco gave him a sidelong smile, but that changed when Harry licked the side of Draco’s throat. “There’s only one room I want to see right now, and that’s the bedroom.”  
  
“Yes,  _sir_ ,” Draco said. Harry blushed as he realized that he’d automatically adopted the voice that he used when ordering Ron to back away from a suspect who’d killed several children. Harry had never thought he’d be the level-headed one in any situation—until he saw how seriously Ron took the murder of children.   
  
But Draco was licking his lips and looked turned on by it if anything, so Harry let him half-lead, half-wrestle Harry through the door and to the foot of a staircase. Harry groaned as he looked up them.  
  
“We have to go up before we can lie down?” he whined.  
  
“Oh, yes,” Draco said, and fastened his teeth back in the bite he’d made before, sucking so strongly that Harry sagged bonelessly in his arms a moment later. “But I promise it will be worth it.”  
  
Gazing up at the half-crazed look in Draco’s eyes, giving up control of his own breath as a bad job, feeling the tingling smart from his neck that joined with the throb spreading up from his groin, Harry could only agree.  
  
*  
  
The bed was more than large enough, with more than enough fluffy white pillows and bright green sheets. But it had no curtains, or posts either, as if Draco thought everything they did on it should be free and open to the world. At least the windows had an Occluding Spell on them, which Harry promptly activated before Draco took his wand away from him, threw it on the table, and pressed him into the bed, smiling expectantly.  
  
“Shy?” Draco’s voice had deepened to a level Harry had thought he would never hear in real life, and that made him press his erection against Draco’s knee, rocking mindlessly for a moment. “You don’t need to be. You never need to be.”  
  
He pulled down Harry’s collar, chuckled appreciatively at the sight of bare skin, and then began to unbutton him. Harry leaned back on the pillows and let him do it.  _That_  let him appreciate the way Draco’s neat hair frizzed at the ends now. His cheeks had gone slack with want, too, as if it were once again too much effort to maintain the smile.  
  
That was nice.  
  
But Harry wanted more than nice, and as Draco pulled off his trousers and pants at last, he claimed it, rolling around on top of Draco and pinning him to the bed with a single forceful push. Then he snapped his fingers, concentrating hard. The one time he had used this spell wandlessly in the past, to distract a fleeing suspect, had gone rather badly; the suspect had been hopping on one sprained ankle and one good one when Harry and Ron took him into custody.  
  
This time it functioned perfectly, maybe thanks to Harry’s ruthless desire, which made his hips buck every few seconds now. Draco was suddenly naked. He blinked, then blinked again, and the smile came back. But this was a different smile, sliding slowly and relentlessly up his face, and Harry shivered.  
  
“I think,” Draco said in a whisper, “that having a lover with that much power is going to be  _very_  pleasant.” He stretched his hands out along the pillow and arched a brow. “Can you do the same thing with the lubricant?”  
  
It took Harry two tries to whisper, “ _Accio_  lubricant,” his mouth was so dry. A small tube soared out of the door on the far wall, which probably led to a bathroom, and landed on the bed beside them. Harry tried to be annoyed that Draco had been confident enough to leave it there before he’d even shown Harry the bed. With Draco staring up at him, his eyes half-lidded, his own hips rocking back against Harry’s, trying to be annoyed didn’t work very well.  
  
“I actually meant, ‘Can you conjure lubricant wandlessly and slick my cock?’, but this way works, too,” Draco said. He picked up the tube of oil whilst Harry was still spluttering and slid a coated finger into him.  
  
Harry gasped and contracted his muscles reflexively. Then he said, “You don’t—you don’t —you don’t—”  
  
“That’s three times you’ve claimed a lack of ability on my part, Harry,” Draco whispered. “Should I be offended?” And, keeping his finger in Harry’s arse and bracing his other hand on the pillow, he flipped them so that Harry lay beneath him again.   
  
“You have no right to possess coordination like that when you probably haven’t played Quidditch for ages,” Harry said, startled back into his right mind.  
  
“I play Quidditch every weekend,” Draco said.  
  
“Is that for me, too?” Harry fluttered his eyelashes at Draco, and grinned. It was easier now that he was getting used to the finger in his arse. “Were you afraid that you wouldn’t be able to keep up with me, and had to impress me somehow?”  
  
Draco twisted his finger, and added a second one, which he’d managed to slick without Harry noticing it. “Prat,” he said. “I’ll have you know that I started that years ago, long before I ever thought I’d have a chance with you.”  
  
“I notice,” Harry said, concentrating furiously so that he could get his words out around the urge to be quiet and let Draco’s fingers do whatever they wanted, “that you didn’t say ‘before I started wanting you.’”  
  
“Shut up,” Draco said. His voice was concentrated, too, not angry, but Harry shut up with a long moan, seeing the way Draco was looking at his arse. The fingers twisted, then retreated, and returned with a third companion. Draco licked his lips and shook his head, his hair swaying in front of his face. His forehead was slick with sweat, which at least indicated that his acrobatics hadn’t been effortless.  
  
Harry had wondered if Draco would be gentle with him, since he knew Harry hadn’t had anal sex before. It didn’t look that way. He was glad.  
  
Because, whilst he might not know a lot about how many fingers he wanted up his arse or how rough he wanted it, he knew already that he preferred having sex like this: with Draco, and with Draco so lost to passion that he didn’t ask before he dragged his fingers out and slid the head of his cock in.  
  
He  _did_  go slowly enough after that that Harry could have stopped him if he wanted. But Harry didn’t want to, and in fact, he squeezed down with his arse a few times to hurry Draco along. Draco snarled and shoved suddenly, which made Harry tilt his head back and swear between clenched teeth.  
  
“Did I hurt you?” Draco was breathing harshly.  
  
He would have heard only arrogance in the tone a few hours ago. Now he could note the gentleness beneath it.  
  
Harry smiled and opened his eyes. Draco stared down at him, eyes cloudy again, but seeing  _him_  perfectly.  
  
 _And that’s the way I like Draco. Fighting to protect the tender parts of himself, whilst letting me know they’re there._  
  
“Are you going to ride me or not?” he asked.  
  
Draco dug his fingers into his hips in answer, and pumped forwards. “Going to make you come without touching your cock,” he explained, and pushed again, before settling into a steady thrusting rhythm.  
  
All the time, his eyes remained open. All the time, his eyes remained on Harry.  
  
Harry felt as though he had separated into two people. One was in his body, enjoying the new sensation of fullness and the way Draco shoved him up the pillow as he fucked him, the squelching of the lubricant and the slap of skin like wet towels hitting together. The other was in some distant aesthetic part of his mind, and could admire the light of the lamps on the walls shining through Draco’s hair, the softness of his skin when Harry reached up to his face, the curve of his lips as Harry’s finger traced them.  
  
And always, always, his eyes, brilliant and threaded with gold from the lamplight and open and  _looking_.  
  
Then the two halves of himself slammed together again, and Harry grabbed onto Draco, as Draco nudged something that  _must_  be his prostate. Draco was all soft skin and softly malevolent chuckle and soft teasing thrusts then, only speeding up when Harry issued some sort of incoherent threat against his firstborn.  
  
“Oh, the firstborn son I’m never going to have, unless I adopt,” Draco said mockingly as he sped up his thrusts.  
  
Harry appreciated the declaration of intent for what it was, but still thought it utterly unfair that Draco could talk in coherent sentences at the moment.   
  
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he chanted, and then the pleasure burned through him and gripped his cock and left him all at once in a thundering orgasm that was rather like standing under a waterfall in reverse.  
  
“Told you,” Draco whispered, and at least he was back to monosyllables as Harry clamped down on him and he came, too, his mouth falling open and his eyes half-shutting until he forced them wide again.  
  
When he was lying on Harry and kissing his face, he whispered, “I’m sorry I didn’t just have the courage to approach you in the first place.” He kissed Harry’s eyelids. “I’m sorry for acting like a prick at Warbeck’s.” And he nuzzled his cheek into Harry’s. “And the morning I received Pansy’s letter. But I’ll have you know that I was preparing to go to your room at midnight, just like the horoscope said, and I was most irritated when you weren’t there.”  
  
Harry laid a hand on his cheek. “Thanks,” he said. He was willing to wager that Draco didn’t apologize a lot, either. “Think I should tell Hermione that horoscopes aren’t as dubious in value as she thinks they are?”  
  
“Depends,” Draco said, rolling off him to land next to him on the bed. His eyes were still open; Harry wondered if he ever intended to blink again. He ran a possessive, happy hand across Harry’s shoulder. “Would doing that get her over her own sexual repression and into Weasley’s arms faster, or not?”  
  
Harry blinked. “You  _sensed_  her repression?”  
  
“Small beings on the further moons of Jupiter can sense her repression,” Draco said. “But don’t worry.” His smile was pure humor. “Tell her that horoscopes are dubious in a way that’ll make her pay more attention to them. I can have Bethany insert some interesting things among them. What is she? A Virgo?” He paused meditatively. “Maybe  _that’s_  her problem.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “Whatever you need to do,” he said. “When I go into work with an enormous smile on my face tomorrow, Ron will be sure that you’re guilty of something. If only Confounding me.”  
  
“Then invite Weasley to observe the midnight orgies in Draco Malfoy’s mysterious new wing,” Draco suggested, wrapping his arms around Harry. “Don’t tell him beforehand who the participants will be. If we can’t get Granger to admit her repression, then maybe we can give Weasley a few bright ideas.”  
  
Harry laughed and let his head fall on Draco’s shoulder. He knew that he’d have to do a bit of fast explaining with both Ron and Hermione. And there was Robards, who would not be pleased to know there had never been a real case requiring Auror attention at all.  
  
But that was for the morning.  
  
As he started to yawn, he looked up and saw Draco’s burning gaze still fixed on him. “Are you ever going to close your eyes?” he asked.  
  
“When I’m sure that you’re here beside me,” Draco whispered back, “and that you’re safe and sound. That might take a few years.” His arms tightened around Harry.  
  
Harry smiled and closed his own eyes, tightening his grip on Draco in return. He tried to imagine what kind of horoscope Bethany Helser would write to describe this moment.  
  
 _And tonight you’ll be safe in the arms of someone who might just turn out to be your true love._  
  
That would sum up the matter nicely.  
  
 **End**.


End file.
